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Show Go Love/160 pet like Moon; when we mourn, we mourn for our lost selves. I know the man in the dark pull over, like a light left on in a room across the street I once visited, only the furniture's rearranged and a rubber tree grows where the unfinished duck painting once leaned The man from the moon, he's come. Judy sits beside me, floral smelling, honeysuckle. "Your mama," she says. "Like this so long?" When we stayed in this room before, Mama left a note outside on the windshield Dinner's at 730, Sweeties, it said. Three boys, brothers, rip up the pool. And the man walks to his room, the easternmost wing, whoever he is. "What do you mean-like this so long?" She sips jug wine from a plastic motel cup. She's lost her own mother, O.W.'s, who maybe overdosed or something, I've never been sure. Judy looks at the floor. "It's a hard thing " "How?" We meet eyes. "Waiting to die," she says. "Mama was waiting to die?" The hummingbird hovers outside the picture window, its beak just skimming glass "O.W.'s been on pins and needles." "We had a cabin on Greer's Ferry We were all going to Blue Clouds." Judy swipes tears. "It's a strange life," she says. Lara leaps up beside me in a tee shirt with two crabs arm wrestling. Renee sits beside her, all these times I've dragged her to Arkansas, to Grampa's lake trailer or the family cemetery-blackberry picking in the Solgahatchie bottom. The liquor sears my throat, only for a second. |